"How is this possible, you know?" she chuckled. "Everyone else can turn 40. I'm Molly Ringwald. I'm so associated with being young and being with a teenager."She said it was "pretty odd" going through the same things teenagers go through while playing a teen. "And it was also, you know, a lot to go through! I mean, those movies really propelled me into pretty intense stardom at a pretty young age."
"I didn't have parents who were, you know, racing to get a reality television show, you know? Or looking to benefit in some way from their daughter's fame." She was just a 6-year-old kid who liked singing when she began performing with her father, jazz pianist Bob Ringwald, who is blind.He used to tell people, "Someday I'll be known as Molly Ringwald's father."
"I think he's an amazing pianist, but when I think of my dad I think of him as an amazing father, first and foremost," Molly said. "I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded."Molly would often read out loud to her father, and soon started performing for a much larger audience on TV.
Before they even met, Ringwald was his muse. Hughes had asked his agent for photos of promising young actresses ..."And my headshot was among this giant stack that he received," she recalled. "And he put it up over his desk and wrote 'Sixteen Candles,' basically over a weekend."
Hughes had an intense connection to his own adolescence. "He remembered his high school locker combination, which I always thought was really incredible," Ringwald said. "I don't remember my locker combination!"
"I kept everything from 'Pretty in Pink,' except for the dress because I disliked it so intensely," she said. "And of course that is the thing that I would love to have now."
On screen Ringwald could be funny, pining, insecure - in other words, an ordinary teenager. The New Yorker's film critic was an early fan ... Pauline Kael wrote that Ringwald had a "charismatic normality."
"That always seemed like a backhanded compliment to me," Ringwald said. "When I first read it when I was a teenager, 'cause you don't want to be considered 'normal' when you're a teenager. You want to be extraordinary."
The transition to adult roles was difficult for Ringwald. She turned down the leads in "Ghost" and "Pretty Woman," and her career seemed to go into freefall.
"I should have been a tragedy. I should have just exploded, you know, or imploded or something. Or, you know, gotten involved in drugs or done something terrible."
Yes, the usual Hollywood script has the former teen star melting down at this point.But Ringwald was too, well, normal for that. "I just needed to leave Hollywood," she said. "And I was living a life that I didn't really relate to."
"In a way, yeah," she said. "I thought, this is going to be my college education. I just felt like that's where I needed to be at that time."
When she returned to the U.S., she settled in New York, acting mostly on stage. Then over e-mail she was introduced by friends to Panio Giannopolous."I thought he was older than me. I thought he was kind of swarthy and short. For some reason I thought he was gonna be short," she said.
"Yes. Yeah, she thought, 'Short, hairy, giant eyebrows, dark hair,' yeah, it was a pretty flattering image she had in mind of me, yeah!" Panio laughed.
These days Ringwald is finding comfort once again in singing - a normal pleasure in the extraordinary life of America's former favorite teen.
Ahh, the 80s. My favourite toy in 1989 was my A-Team guitar. It was a tiny plastic guitar with a picture of Mr. T plastered on the front lol.
The show is awful! Extremely bad acting and writing. Even the "good" actors, people who have been doing it for a while, are terrible on that show.
Amy: I'm going to the mall. I told dad i was going to the mall, he didn't tell you I was going to the mall? why wouldn't he tell you i was going to the mall?
Ricky: Look, even if he had told me you were going to the mall i wouldn't care that you were going to the mall cause it's none of my business and it shouldn't be your business to make it my business cause I'm not going to the mall and if i were going to the mall i wouldnt be going with you, okay?
Thanks to John Hughes, I thought it didn't matter that I was a dork because the superhot athlete was going to fall for me anyway. Spoiler alert: he never did. Oh well, I bet he was a douche.
I love her John Hughes trifecta of films but she was such a bad actress. Yelling does not equal emoting. And she seems so weird and kind of almost ungrateful (not in this interview, but in other stuff she has said).
She's great in the John Hughes movies because all she had to do was act like a teenager, which she was. I haven't seen her in anything else.
I will say, though, that she visited my John Hughes class and answered questions, and she seemed really nice (and actually fairly graceful about her good fortune) but incredibly reserved/shy. She seemed like she didn't really like talking to people, but more because of introversion than because of snobbishness.
Hughes had an intense connection to his own adolescence. "He remembered his high school locker combination, which I always thought was really incredible," Ringwald said. "I don't remember my locker combination!"
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